OpenSocial, which we've always maintained is a surprisingly elegant PR scam, isn't due out until next year. Facebook continues to add 100 (still entirely useless) apps a day to its now purportedly open platform. So is there any point to Google's OpenSocial anymore? Sure there is. Just ask the guy whose career at Google depends on it.

Facebook wasn't invited to the OpenSocial party. Now it's throwing its own. Facebook says it will allow other social networks to use the software behind its third-party developer platform as a model. "In fact, we'll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms," Ami Vora writes on its Facebook Developers blog. The big loser? Well, anyone who writes apps for social networks, pretty much by definition. But also, Google.

Developers write apps for Facebook not because it's a wonder of modern software, but because it lets them tap into Facebook's 60 million users. The result: a surfeit of zombie bites and Scrabble challenges, spread, in Valley parlance, "virally" from friend to friend on the social network. Last night, Facebook proved antiviral. A bug deleted all pending requests from friends to add an application. "Anyone else seeing that invitation acceptance numbers are down significantly over the past 7-8 hours?" one developer wrote in a Facebook forum. "Since about midnight PT, our signup numbers through requests/invites are about 40% lower than we'd normally expect." Facebook's response? An emoticon!